Netbook Considerations

Portability comes at a cost and this article wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t bring up some considerations when shopping for a netbook.

Disc Drive – Netbooks will not offer an internal CD, DVD or Blu-ray Disc drive. Instead, external drives may be purchased separately and connect via e-SATA, IEEE 1394 Firewire, or USB 2.0.

Screen size – Some applications are not meant to be displayed on such a small screen: spreadsheets, photo editing software such as Photoshop and Photoshop Elements are not able to display fully on such a small screen.

Performance – Typically, today’s laptops operate on 1.3 to 1.66GHz processors and 1GB of RAM. While this is enough for general purpose office use – email, word processing, browsing the web or other light tasks – it is not recommended that you attempt running 3D games, rendering software, or run too many simultaneous operations. Doing so will likely degrade your performance to unbearable freezing, stutters, or crashes. As a general rule, refer to the minimum and recommended system requirements for each piece of software before installing.

Keyboard – Reducing the size of the screen also requires the shrinking of the keyboard. Some of the 7-inch netbooks utilize a keyboard that is roughly 82% the size of a desktop keyboard and have resized or relocated entirely some commonly used keys. As screen sizes increase, so do the keyboards – most 10-inch netbooks are approximately 92-97%% the size of a desktop keyboard.

Trackpad – Various manufacturers have toyed with the trackpad, elongating it and placing buttons to the left and right of the pad or shrinking the size to the point that you must make short, swift movements for your pointer to reach one end of the desktop to the other. This can be adjusted in the Windows control panel, as well as the disabling of the vertical page scroll when using the right-most area of the trackpad, but as with all things, a little time is required to adjust.